National Library of the Argentine Republic

The National Library of the Argentine Republic is the largest library in Argentina.

The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books about the history and culture of Argentina.

The National Library of the Argentine Republic was founded in 1810 and originally called the Public Library of Buenos Aires. In the late 1800s, it was officially renamed the National Library of Argentina. Its first director was Mariano Moreno, an Argentine lawyer, journalist, and politician. Moreno saw the library as an essential part of public awareness of political and civic life. Public education was considered necessary for building an independent nation.

One of the National Library’s most internationally celebrated directors was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The TU Library owns a number of books by and about Jorge Luis Borges.

When he became blind, Borges had people read to him when he could no longer read for himself. Among his favorite writers, many of whom are represented in the collection of the TU Library, were Julio Cortázar; Franz Kafka; G.K. Chesterton; and Wilkie Collins.

Among observations by Borges are the following:

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

• “To the Reader,”, preface to Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)

Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.

• “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)

Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.

• “A Poem by Oscar Wilde” (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

• Universal History of Infamy (1935) Preface

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

• “Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv,” in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935)

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.

• “The Library of Babel” (1941)

Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the “vain and superstitious habit” of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one’s hand.

• “The Library of Babel” (1941)

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

• Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946)

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

• On William Thomas Beckford’s Vathek (1943)

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know that one is immortal. There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

• “The Immortal” in The Aleph (1949)

Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

• The Theologians

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

• Preface to Dr. Brodie’s Report (1970)

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

• “Unworthy”, in Brodie’s Report (1970)

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library … Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

• “The Divine Comedy” (1977)

Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.

• “The Divine Comedy” (1977)

There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.

• “Poetry” (1977)

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

• Private Dictionary of Jorge Luis Borges (1979)

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don’t know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves — and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity — are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we’ll be just, well, cosmopolitans.

• “A Conversation With Jorge Luis Borges”, Artful Dodge (April 1980)

I have committed the worst sin that can be committed. I have not been happy.

• Borges at Eighty : Conversations (1982)

Life itself is a quotation.

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

• Twenty-four Conversations with Borges (1984)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)